The EECS Graduate Funding Handbook

or: how much money am I supposed to be making a year?

Last updated: Sep 13, 2024.

Graduate student funding can be a confusing topic! This document aims to be a one-stop resource for all of your questions surrounding how much we are and should be getting paid. In particular, this document aims to cover a bunch of different topics, including:

1. How grad school funding works in general. Where does our money come from? What's a GSR and a GSI? How do fellowships play into this? What if I'm an international student?
2. How EECS grad student pay used to work before the 2022 strikes. This includes exact dollar amounts and policies around appointments.
3. How much we're supposed to be making now.
4. Why we're making less than what we're supposed to be making. Post-strike, we were supposed to get some pretty big raises! The department doesn't like this, and has been using different tactics to pay us arbitrarily less.

If you're looking to get a full understanding of how funding works and what changes the department has made over time, we'd recommend reading this document from top-to-bottom. It contains full prose explanations accompanied by interactive charts and visuals.

How this document is structured

If you look to your left, you'll see this document is divided into a number of different pages. The earlier pages provide context on how pay works and explain terms that you'll see a lot (e.g., "What is a pay step?"). Later pages provide interactives and visuals for how much we are—and how much we should be—getting paid.

But don't we already have it good?

I completely agree with you! This is 100% correct.

Every graduate program has its own unique rules about how graduate students are funded, and in general, EECS students do have a lot of privileges. As students, our funding sources are, for the most part, more stable. Although there are certainly many exceptions, we can make stronger assumptions about if we will be funded (with fee remissions) during the course of our program. And relative to other grad students, we're generally paid at the higher end of the grad student scale.

But if anything, this is even more of a reason to make information about funding public and advocate for changes! Our working conditions didn't come from nowhere; they were fought and advocated for by countless generations of past grad students, putting their time and effort into making sure that future grad students—us!—would be able to enjoy better conditions and protections as grad students.

And there's still so much further to go, both for EECS students and for other graduate students. As we'll see in the rest of this guide, EECS students still face a ton of challenges to their quality of living, and the department is actively trying to make our quality of living worse! And this is to say nothing about folks in other departments, where funding can be harder to come by and more limited. We will discuss this further in the conclusion, but in short: talking about our funding situation, and where we're being let down, can help all of us aspire to a world where all grad students, in EECS and across the Berkeley campus, are paid fairly for their work.

In particular, I want to mention a few reasons why we'd want to talk about this:

Funding is incredibly opaque and constantly changing, and info is often passed by word-of-mouth.

Funding can be an incredibly opaque issue, and info about funding is often acquired passed on implicitly, often through word-of-mouth and knowing the right people. This document aspires to provide a comprehensive resource for questions, drawn from the accumulated knowledge of many different graduate folks within EECS. In particular, this page aims to be a living document, one which will change and adapt as the funding situation evolves.

Additionally, for folks outside the EECS department—grad students or curious onlookers—this document hopefully provides a window into the nuts and bolts of how funding within our department works. Hopefully, this document can give a useful insight for what policies you want to push for in your own department, and what things to look out for.

This is an equity issue. This lack of information hurts under-privileged students the most.

For folks more reliant on graduate funding for basic necessities, and folks who are less familiar with the unspoken norms of (computing) academia, these folks are impacted the most by changes (or as we will see soon, reductions) in funding.

And for students in other departments, where funding is harder to come by, lack of access to information about how funding works can be a serious deterrent to wanting to engage with or pursue work in academia.

This issue has history behind it, and all grad students—EECS and other departments included—deserve better.

We acknowledge that Berkeley EECS grad students are privileged in many ways. The purpose of this document isn't to take these things for granted; instead, this document is an aspirational project to show where the university falls short for all of us grad students, EECS and beyond, and to illustrate what we should expect from the university.

Indeed, many of the privileges we enjoy now are the result of past generations of graduate students working and fighting tirelessly for better working conditions; this document hopefully serves as a reminder and continuation of that tradition.

We also hope this document can contextualize and historicize how our current pay conditions came to be. The privileges we enjoy today—like tuition/fee remissions—didn't come out of nowhere or because of department benevolence, but because of past generations of graduate students working to guarantee better conditions.

Colophon

This document borrows extremely heavily from—in prose, calculations, and structure—from the EECS Wages Spreadsheet.